Cory Booker Campaign Slams National Review After Allegations That He Made Up A Drug-Dealing Friend

On Thursday, National Review's Eliana Johnson wrote a
detailed account that alleged a key character in one of Cory
Booker's frequent campaign-trail stories — a drug dealer named
T-Bone who once threatened Booker's life but then became his
friend — is imaginary.

Booker's campaign responded by going hard after the
conservative-leaning publication, and it continued to insist that
"T-Bone" is indeed a real person.

Johnson's key source is Rutgers University history professor
Clement Price, a Booker supporter who confided to the publication
that Booker told him that T-Bone was a "composite" of several
people he been around growing up in Newark.

The Booker campaign says that "T-Bone" is a real person, and it
accused National Review of trying to dredge up a 5-year-old story
to damage Booker's candidacy for U.S. Senate in New Jersey.

"This is a national, partisan, right-wing publication that's
trying to make a fake controversy from 2008 into a fake
controversy from today. That's essentially what it is," Booker
campaign spokesman Kevin Griffis told Business Insider in an
interview late Thursday."It's just not — it's old news."

Griffis pointed to a 2008 piece in Esquire, when Booker last
extensively addressed the controversy. In the interview with
Esquire, Booker did admit that though "T-Bone" is real, his
actual name might differ. That was one of Price's criticisms to
National Review, as he said T-Bone was a Southern-sounding
nickname that you'd most likely run into in a place like Memphis,
not Newark.

Here's an excerpt of what that Esquire story detailed, including
an interview with Price:

Price doesn't challenge Booker's sincerity or authenticity. "He's
genuine," says Price, "and I'll tell you why I take that notion
to the bank: I've spent some time with his dad, and his dad is
almost incapable of raising a bullshit artist."

But Price does have a bone to pick with Booker's heroics -- the
apartment in Brick Towers; pitching a tent to conduct a ten-day
fast in 1999 to shame Sharpe James into providing more police and
better city services to his ward; his 2000 move into a battered
motor home that Booker drove to the city's darker corners for
campouts -- and with the Heart of Newark Darkness tales Booker
tells and retells.

Like Booker's T-Bone story, about the zombified Brick Towers drug
pusher who once threatened to kill Booker but who, many moons
later, wound up sitting in Booker's car, pouring forth his pain,
weeping as Booker let him cry it out before going off to prison.

T-Bone's actual earthly existence has been fodder for
public debate, leading Booker to admit that although T-Bone's
corporeal being is "1,000 percent real," he's an "archetype" of
an aspect of Newark's woe whose actual nom de crack may not
actually be T-Bone. Which pisses off a historian like Clement
Price.

Griffis said that nothing has changed since 2008, and that T-Bone
is an "actual human being."

"That's the reality. It's sort of silly," he said. "There are any
number of people, if you lived in that community — if you lived
there — that was your daily reality, where those people — people
like T-Bone — they were part of the fabric of living in Brick
Towers. That person was a fact of life."

Price, the Rutgers professor, didn't respond to multiple emails
and phone calls requesting comment. When asked if the Booker
campaign was saying he was misremembering the conversation
between himself and Booker, Griffis said he was. He also repeated
the charge that National Review was bringing back an old
controversy to stir partisan flames.

"It's a fake story," Griffis said. "It's a partisan journal
trying to basically do what a partisan publication does, which is
try to create turbulence for Democratic candidates. It's sort of
a time-honored tradition."